


Adam and his Grief

by adadshi



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Adam-Centric, Galaxy Garrison, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Post-Kerberos Mission, adam is bad at feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-05
Updated: 2019-10-05
Packaged: 2020-11-24 13:33:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,884
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20908481
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/adadshi/pseuds/adadshi
Summary: Adam has spent eight years preparing for Shiro's death. Eight years that go down the drain when the Kerberos Mission goes wrong.





	Adam and his Grief

They don’t tell Adam about the Kerberos disaster. There’s no need. He comes home from Rotterdam looking refreshed and light, a weight eight-years heavy lifted off his shoulders. The gold ring around his finger doesn’t glisten like it used to. 

He’s barely put his case down before he’s set to work. The pill cabinet will need emptying, and there’s not much use in keeping the crutches and canes. He methodically folds each old t-shirt and tosses every forgotten sock from underneath the bed into the laundry basket. Adam ignores the sniffling lump under the blankets but leaves a cup of tea on the nightstand. Lavender with a little bit of chamomile, just as Keith likes it.   
Soon Adam is sitting on his knees with all of Shiro’s belongings in front of him. He tries several different methods of organising: by category, by colour, by height. As he feels the cold fabric of a childhood cross-stitch, his fingers go numb. How morbid to mess with a dead man’s things. 

He prepared himself for this. When he was eighteen, hiding in the bathroom of Shiro’s hospital room and holding back tears, Adam asked himself if he wanted this life. A life of pillboxes and injections, therapies and remedies, shakes and stumbles, all accompanied to a slowing soundtrack of a cardiac monitor. He said yes, he dried his eyes and held Shiro’s hand until the drugs lulled him to sleep.

He prepared himself for this. Spent eight years thinking of funerals and flowers while Shiro thought of space and the stars. They were wed at twenty and applied to adopt at twenty-one. Turned down at twenty-two but Adam couldn’t find the energy to cry. It’s the same feeling now but tinged with guilt.

Adam can see that Keith is feeling a different kind of grief. The glaring red of his eyes contrasts harshly with the ghostly white of his skin. A Galaxy Garrison tank top- something Adam noticed was missing from Shiro’s inventory- hangs off his torso. He doesn’t say anything. 

Keith sits down on the ground beside him and leans down to examine Shiro’s things. Adam notes how his shoulder blades sharply jut out from his back. He’s lost weight. 

“I thought he would have more trophies,” Keith says as he picks up an old kindergarten drawing. A mother, a little boy and his kitten. On the top corner of the paper, an adult has written encouragement in Japanese and stuck a smiley face sticker beside their words. It was small, sentimental things that mattered to Shiro, not the regal glitz and glam of Garrison awards. 

From his breast pocket, Adam brings out a small, grey box embellished with the Garrison logo. It was mailed to him in Rotterdam, a grim reminder of his life outside his family home. Feeling Keith’s eyes on him, he opens up the box. The lid snaps back, revealing a black star hanging from an orange ribbon. He picks it up, watches the metal shimmer under the light and then passes it to Keith. The cadet takes it in his cupped hands and brings it close to his face.

“A medal of honour. They mailed it to me, but he’d want you to have it.” 

Adam remembers the day Shiro came home raving about Keith, a scruffy kid who excelled in a simulator even second-year cadets struggled with. From then on, Shiro did everything possible to get him into the Garrison. Adam finally met him on the first day of the new school year when he arrived in the teacher’s lounge with a black eye and bleeding nose, asking to see Mr Takashi Shirogane. 

Adam watched as they grew closer during the months and listened as Shiro voiced his concerns and fears about the boy’s future. Shiro saw Keith as more than a successor, more than a cadet to take under his wing. He loved Keith. He was the little brother he always wanted. 

Now, Adam watches as Keith’s frame shakes and jolts. Tears drip down onto the carpet and he clutches the medal to his heaving chest. He’s not the same irritable child Adam met all those months ago. His hard exterior has melted, and sadness has cascaded out into the open. Too much sadness for someone so young. Keith makes a pitiful sight, one that Adam did not prepare for. 

“Go back to bed.” Adam says, “I’ll bring you more tea.” 

Time passes. Many cups of tea are made. Adam keeps himself busy with taking care of Keith, keeping him fed and washed and stable. He regrets fleeing home to Rotterdam immediately after Shiro left for Kerberos. Had Keith suffered alone for this entire time? Shame becomes a familiar feeling to him. 

The collection of Shiro’s things stay in a little square on the living room floor. Adam passes by them each day and wonders what thrift stores will accept pressed flowers and cassette tapes as donations. He knows that Keith will want to keep every single item so they’ll have to go before he can fight for them.

Keith’s grief is a monster. It keeps him up at night, makes his eyes tired and teary, so Adam watches until his eyes begin to flutter before going about with his business. It takes a while before Keith gets so tired that he sleeps for over an hour. That time Adam goes to his dorm, which he presumably hasn’t been in since Shiro’s death. 

The little room is not liveable. The desk has been thrown onto its side and all that remains of the mirror is a million little reflective shards on the carpet. The pillow has been ripped open and feathers have landed all over the bed. It’s a wreck, a wreck caused in a flurry of fury and violent upset. Adam isn’t able to salvage much behind a battered brown jacket and a little metal tin that was somehow protected at the bottom of the closet. He puts these things in Shiro’s old closet. Might as well utilise the space. 

Keith’s grief started violently, Adam deduces, but soon watered down into the desperate sadness he witnessed after his return from Rotterdam. It’s somehow worse than the anger. Keith accepts the pampering without a fight: allowing Adam to spoon-feed him soup, wash his shaggy hair over the sink, he even reaches out for the attention.

“What was he like when you met?” Keith asks one afternoon, referring to Shiro. He’s lying with his head in Adam’s lap and his legs are a tangled mess underneath the duvet. 

The question catches Adam off guard. His head hurts from spending so long sitting and his stomach is cramping but he can’t deny Keith the story. The boy is hungry for scraps of the parts of Shiro he didn’t know, the parts only Adam knew.

“Well,” He starts, “I didn’t know him when we were cadets. I was enrolled at the Garrison’s school in Berlin and he was over here, so we only met when I was picked to spend my senior year here as a transfer student.”

Adam remembers being in the airport at two o’clock in the morning, holding his mother’s hand as they waited in the queue to have his luggage weighed. His case was decorated with stickers from all over Europe but he’d never been to America. Across the Atlantic, new opportunities awaited him.

“This place was so different from home.” He strokes Keith’s hair, fingers just almost tickling his hairline, “I hadn’t prepared accordingly so the first few months were especially hard. Everyone was so focused on graduating- no one had time to make friends with me.”

“Apart from Shiro.”

“Apart from Shiro.” He confirms with a nod, “He was my dorm neighbour so I would go next door to him to ask for advice. He’d gone through it all already when he moved from Japan, you see. One thing led to another and he asked me out.”

He feels Keith’s lips curl up against his skin. Adam finds himself smiling, too.

“And I was mortified! Mortified and hysterical, but I agreed.”

He remembers vague details of that night. Adam was lying on his front, flipping through a textbook while listening to a pop song on the radio. Shiro was wearing a pair of red shorts. They laughed while they kissed, snorting and shrieking until Adam’s other dorm neighbour was banging on the wall for some peace. But they continued to kiss, rolling around on the messy bed and almost falling off a million times but having the time of their lives.

He witnessed Shiro’s first collapse three weeks later, three beautiful weeks of kisses shared secretly between classes, and pledged the rest of his life to his Takashi.

The fairytale feeling wore off quickly after that. A grim feeling settled into Adam’s heart. The knowledge of Shiro’s inevitable early death was a heavy burden to carry, but he carried it for eight years. Eight years of love, the sweetest love Adam ever could have wanted, and four months of sorrow, the most overwhelming sorrow Adam knew he’d ever feel. But he was quick to grow numb and desensitise himself from Shiro’s fate. He learned to prepare.

He repeats this fact to himself as tears drip down his face. He prepared for this, prepared every day for Shiro’s death. Looked at the home they’d created for themselves and accepted that one day half of it would be gone, packed away in boxes and sent to a thrift store. Organised pillboxes and thought about how it would only be part of his morning routine for the next three years at most. Shamelessly read funeral advertisements online. Shiro chased life and Adam sat back and waited for the end of the world.

“I prepared for this.” He whispers to Keith.

“You can’t prepare for death, Adam.”

The cadet sits up from his lap and sits on the side of the bed. His shoulder blades are less prominent now. He turns to look at Adam and says, “I’ll make you jasmine tea.”

Adam buries himself underneath the duvet and blankets. He stops crying easily. Where he was once hollow, there is now sadness. Pure, undeniable sadness he spent too long ignoring. Keith’s grief was a monster, Adam’s grief was a timid mouse.

The next day, Keith is nowhere to be found. Adam wakes up early and, while frantically pulling on a pair of trousers, notices that Keith’s battered brown jacket and little metal tin are missing from the bottom of the closet. He counts twenty dollars absent from his wallet and the medal of honour and keys to Shiro’s hoverbike keys are gone from the square of items. 

Adam stands in the kitchen, half-dressed and teary, looking out to the desert. Among the dunes and lone oases, someone is racing towards the horizon, black hair whipping wildly behind them. Adam smiles. Just like his brother did, Keith’s chasing happiness. His monster has been slain. 

Adam goes into the living room and sits down on his case. He hasn’t had the chance to put it away since returning from Rotterdam. He stares at all of Shiro’s things on the floor. The cross-stitch, the drawings, the pill bottles. The cane, the crutch, the ring. Tears gather in his eyes, and he smiles. 

**Author's Note:**

> Spent too long writing this. Don't think much of it makes sense.
> 
> Twitter: @adadshi


End file.
